Intergalactic Union

by D. L. Harrison

  Uvi asked, “What exactly are you suggesting?”

  “That we do the same here in our shared fifty galaxies, for our payment in protection. We’ll take a small territory in all fifty galaxies, that are currently unclaimed. Our territory here is five hundred light years in radius around Earth. That’s a thousand light years in diameter, which is exactly one percent the diameter of our galaxy.

  “So, in each of the other forty-nine we’ll do the same, a one percent of the galaxy’s diameter in unclaimed space will become human territory in payment of all the other worlds and empires we protect in those galaxies. Obviously, the space would be much smaller in the dwarf galaxies, and twice as large as here in a galaxy with a two hundred thousand light year diameter.

  “A world is priceless. Yet you’d be ceding us nothing directly from your world’s production capability. Even better, as Uvi stated earlier, there’d be no constant payments to worry about or to drain your coffers. Another advantage is the future security of all fifty galaxies, seventy-six if we take Vrok space. The idea of withdrawing our protection is unthinkable, it would destroy my soul to watch your worlds be destroyed or taken advantage of.

  “But I won’t live forever. If we have a small domain in every galaxy, that adds a selfish reason to keep out the powerful empires around us altogether. We’ll be protecting our own interests as well.”

  Rena said, “It would take you tens of millennia to occupy so many worlds, if not over a hundred millennia.”

  I shrugged, “Long term investment. It assures us a large spread out empire over that much time, without the risk of bumping borders with another expanding world. We would of course claim them immediately, and seed probes in all systems in those claimed areas, not just ones with living worlds without sentient life. We would also defend them from encroachment.

  “Like I said, what you’d be giving us would be priceless, but at the same time it wouldn’t cost your people anything, and it wouldn’t be a burden on your populations or economies. It would also be that recurring payment for our continued efforts, as long as you cede that space and respect the borders, that would be everything.”

  It really would, a small area in all seventy-six galaxies would add up to around six hundred thousand worlds we could spread out to over time. Most of them would need to be terraformed, but we certainly had the time. The two hundred thousand number were the expected number of worlds already livable.

  Threx said, “I like the idea, it does address a lot of concerns and issues, and it solves all the current problems. The price has a bite as well, a true cost, in that our races won’t be able to expand to those areas in the far future.”

  Cirlok said, “There’s nothing stopping you from just doing that in first place. We could not prevent you claiming them.”

  I nodded, “But if we just did it, we’d anger a lot of races and worlds as we built a spread-out empire among them. They’d be afraid we would one day turn on all of you. The price, ceding that territory that’s a part of your and their galaxy voluntarily, means we can avoid all of that and satisfy your need of balance at the same time. That has a lot of value, for me at least.”

  Uvi said, “I would agree to this, but I can’t make that decision without consulting with my government.”

  Rena said, “It’s acceptable to me as well, but we should share it with all our trading allies, give them the opportunity to join in the agreement, so they do not feel a dept toward the four of us for paying a price on their behalf.”

  Cirlok said, “Agreed, I too must ratify it with my government.”

  I smiled, without showing teeth, “Me too. It’s a good start and good idea, but I need the rest of humanity to be onboard with the plan. I can’t speak for all of us.”

  Which… could be problematical, given I’d just cut military ties with eight of the most powerful countries on the planet. It was annoying, but I’d have my ambassador to the U.N. introduce it to the floor. It was one of those every leader on Earth decisions anyway, so it was best dealt with in those halls.

  Rena said, “We can reconvene tomorrow, at the same time, to discuss the results of our efforts in that direction?”

  “Sounds good. My people will see to your comfort, and they’ll arrange a tour of the city and the amenities available if you wish.”

  Uvi said, “I’d like that.”

  We all stood up, and Cassie and I waited as they all left.

  Cassie blew out a breath.

  I accused, “You’re no help.”

  She giggled, “Sorry, that just struck me as funny, how did you pull that out of your ass?”

  I shrugged, “It was the most likely plan in the twenty-six galaxies, to justify protecting all those galaxies to the human leaders that would question us protecting millions of worlds with no benefit towards us. When I thought about it, it was the perfect solution for here as well.”

  She replied, “So, it just popped up in your head.”

  I snickered, “Pretty much, yes.”

  She said, “I suppose you want me to forward the meeting to our ambassador and have him put it forward on the U.N floor, today.”

  I nodded, “That’d be awesome.”

  Cassie said, “I like the plan as well. You know, they’re our ships, we don’t need their approval to guard the galaxies.”

  I nodded, “They are, and we will no matter what they say, but we need their agreement to form a long-term expansion map for human space. We’ll just come up with a different cost for them if the U.N says no. A cost that I can unilaterally support without interference, but I’d prefer this plan over anything else, I think.

  “We’ll be basically agreeing not to expand our space in this galaxy any further, and less powerful than us or not they all have ships that eclipse everyone else in the fifty galaxies. We need a treaty, and plenty of space without a fight needed to claim it, or some greedy asshole in a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand years will invade our neighbor’s spaces.

  “It will be enough that humanity will have a joint empire spanning seventy-six galaxies with around six hundred thousand worlds, give or take a few thousand.”

  Cassie said teasingly, “Yeah, until we fill it up.”

  I smirked, “Not my problem, because I’ll be long dead. Although, chances are one of the twelve empires around that space will get uppity, and we’ll have even more small areas to fill in more galaxies. Who knows what could happen? By then, we could be in two hundred galaxies, with one point six million worlds as we take our one percent of each.”

  Cassie popped my bubble again, “Or we could be worm food.”

  “Yeah, there’s always that, but as long as my line and a technomancer rules Astraeus, we’ll have damned good odds of surviving what the universe throws at us.”

  “Yup, as long as we survive the five to six days it’ll take for those upgrades.”

  Right, the current outlook was a little shaky, wasn’t it? There were no guarantees in this life, or this violent universe, but that wouldn’t stop us from fighting until the last, nor would it prevent us from planning for a future with the assumption we’d win through, forever. That was the only way to live, even if that scenario was probably unlikely. The forever part, I mean.

  “Cassie.”

  She smirked, “Yes, Mr. President?”

  “Shut up.”

  She giggled, “Yes, sir.”

  “The best part?”

  She asked, “What’s that?”

  “You’re immortal, so you get to deal with the problem when all the worlds are full up.”

  She gaped at me, and I smirked. Score one for me.

  I shook my head at her banter, and we headed back for the command center.

  Chapter Three

  It was only an hour later, when I answered a call on my augmented reality interface. The most intelligent human scientist in history looked at me, she was also the sexiest. Of course, as my wife I was highly biased, but I believed those to be true facts regardless.

  Diana h
ad her shiny raven hair pinned up and looked at me with her bright green eyes. She was five foot six, athletic and curvy and had only grown more beautiful to me in the last thirteen years. There was some literal truth to that as well, not just my love filters, as she truly looked younger than the day that we’d met thanks to the life extension treatment we’d both taken.

  Her face had a soft classic beauty, and in my opinion, she was still stunning even in the ugly brown skirt and vest woman’s suit with a pearl white blouse buttoned up to her neck. It was the whole hot librarian vibe, but she seemed to think it helped maintain a professional relationship with her male scientists, which was fine with me, of course.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure, Mrs. Akin.”

  She grinned at my flirty tone, “Why, it’s about your daughter, Mr. Akin.”

  I suppressed the surge of disappointment. I’d been hoping she’d been about to tell me the programming was done, and the three days of testing were about to start. To be fair, that’d probably take another day or two. The new advancements touched just about every system, which meant tracing and updating a whole lot of software, not to mention the completely new command and control software that the new shield configurations and subspace beam weapons would need.

  “What’d she do?”

  She shrugged, “Not sure yet, she has a presentation and she wants you there. I think she wants to show off for her father, but she’ll understand if you can’t make it.”

  Yeah, lots of stress and crap, but I was waiting on all of it at the moment. All I’d been doing before she called was working up a couple of new colony ships and platform packages. India wanted to start two more colonies. Their population was already down to nine hundred million after starting ten colonies of fifty million each over the last thirteen years. They were apparently ready for two more, and they wanted the best instead of the colony ships the U.S., England, Russia, and China were offering.

  I’d have suspected the Vrok threat made them go that way, to pay for the best, except India was one of the few countries that hadn’t bought anything from my competition. The colony ships were mostly point and click. I’d made enough of them, combining two platforms for the colony ship and eventual command and control space station when the move was done, and sending another eleven hundred to a colony world as it’s hundred ship fleet and thousand defense platforms was all pre-programmed macros and could be done in seconds.

  The work I had to do on it was all the extras they were asking for. They wanted a hundred million of the Threx augmented reality implants for their colonist, and to have them all quantum paired with a phone and data network on the colony ships themselves. The colony ship would act like a router so they’d all be able to stay on Earth’s internet, make local or interstellar phone calls, and stream from Netflix or update their Facebook status, on their new world.

  They also wanted a thousand nanite medical beds, five hundred for each colony for their healthcare locations. There was also a whole list of smaller add-on bells and whistles for the hundred ships per colony that would be manned.

  Point being, it’d take me hours to map it all out and get the build going, but it was also not a very high priority. They’d given me a full week to get it done and the colony ships ready to turn over, so I had more than enough time to see my daughter and let her show off a bit.

  Plus, I was really curious what she’d have. My girl was too smart and powerful for her own good. Twelve or not, I wasn’t going to underestimate her intelligence or creativity. It was only her judgement that I questioned, and I knew that would mature, probably faster than mine had, by a mile.

  “That sounds good, five minutes, in which lab?”

  She said, “Four A. See you then,” and she hung up.

  I turned to Jessica, “Going to lab four A.”

  Jessica stood up and stretched, and then waved one of her people toward the console to take over the watch.

  “I could use a moment to stretch my legs, and I can admit to a little curiosity.”

  I said, “My daughter is going to wow us.”

  Honestly, I’d had no idea at the time just how much of an understatement that was.

  My daughter looked absolutely adorable in a woman’s suit, but I didn’t say that, because she was obviously going for professional and not playing dress up. Though she couldn’t help the bright smile on her face as she set up a display and faced me, Diana, and Jessica. She had her mother’s beauty around the face, with the same shiny raven black hair, but she’d inherited my light blue eyes.

  “So, what do you have for us, Mel?”

  She said, “A second generation jump drive, that can jump as far as fifty light years a second, without a jump beacon on the other side.”

  I glanced at my wife, who had an expressionless face on, which told me my wife thought that was ludicrous and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I wasn’t quite ready to bet against my progeny however.

  “How does it work?”

  She bounced on her toes for a second, obviously excited, but managed to stop a moment later when she took a calming breath.

  “You understand that jump drives use quantum resonance fields that match both frequency and resonance at both ends. Essentially, we’re tricking the universe into thinking two different spots are actually one spot, so we jump instantaneously from one spot to another without actual movement.”

  I nodded, “I get that much.”

  She said, “Yes, but the reason that works is because the universe itself has a quantum resonance field that changes. The resonance we impart is artificial in nature, and for a moment becomes part of that natural occurring universal field. It’s this natural field that enables us to overcome the inherent limitations of the first generation jump drive.

  “The quantum resonance of the universe stems from the big bang, the field starts at the center of the universe and expands in a spiral pattern in the Fibonacci sequence. That makes it highly predictable, or at least it would if the universe was empty.”

  I raised a hand, and she giggled.

  “Explain that and dumb it down for your dad.”

  She nodded, “Space-time fabric. It is bent by mass. Mass causes gravity, and mass also effects subspace and causes wild energy. It’s all tied together. All the dimensions, and the mass in this universal layer has an effect on all of it. They say the FTL line is outside the heavier parts of a gravity well, but the reason for that gravity well, and the cavitation of wild energies in subspace all comes back to mass impacting the space-time fabric.

  “The quantum resonance fabric for lack of a better world, is like a second layer laying on space time. Mass effects the natural quantum resonance of the universe as well, thus making it impossible to predict inside a solar system, and even up to several light years away in the void.”

  I frowned, “Wait, are you saying we’ll be able to quantum jump without a beacon on the other side, several million light years, as long as we do it to a void?”

  She made a face, “You’re skipping ahead.”

  Diana gasped, and when I turned she had a eureka look on her face.

  I said, “Sorry, Miss Akin, carry on please.”

  She giggled again.

  “Okay. So like gravity and space-time, the quantum fabric is on every level of reality. Subspace is more compact than our dimension, which is what allows faster than light travel there in relation to this universe, without actually going faster than light. For the quantum fabric, the resonance frequencies are higher harmonics of real space in subspace. But they’re also perfect harmonics.

  “So, your ship sits on the edge of a system, it can scan subspace to earth, or to anywhere within fifty light years in just a second. To Earth from the edge of the system, would be less than a millisecond. Anyway, the scanners detect the harmonic quantum frequency, and by that we can determine the frequency in normal space.

  “Once we have that frequency, the drive can match it. Following so far?”

  Diana said, “I think s
o, but how would that work? That matching field in the drive would be microscopic, the natural resonance would change… trillions of times, from the back of the seven-mile-long warship to the front. To create a matching field covering the ship, it’d be complex beyond belief.”

  She smiled, “Yes, but that’s why it takes another step, which I hadn’t mentioned yet. The drive matches the natural resonance to join together that microscopic energy connection. Much how your quantum communicators work, mom. Through that connection, the ship can then expand a matching quantum resonance field of any size to match what it puts around the ship.”

  “That’s brilliant, so you connect through natural resonance to pass energy, then extend the jump field through that?” Diana confirmed.

  Melody nodded, “Exactly. The point is, you can get to any world within fifty light years in just a second. You don’t have to move in system at the speed of light anymore. You could also instantly intercept another ship, even in systems. Then there’s the second advantage to the new drive that dad already figured out. The quantum resonance of anywhere is completely predictable, as long as there is no mass nearby to skew its natural resonance.

  “So like dad said, you could enter in a galaxy two hundred million miles away in the navigation program, and the program will figure out the distance and predict the resonance in the void right outside that galaxy, and then make that energy connection to it. It’s only near star systems where that ability will fail completely. Once there, it’d only be a few minute trip in a wormhole to get in the galaxy and within fifty light years of your destination. Then you go back to the scan subspace way, and pop to your destination in under a second.

  “Obviously in those cases, having something on the other end as a beacon would still be useful, but it’s still a lot faster than taking a wormhole the whole way, which at a hundred million light years would take over ten hours. Another benefit however, in needing no beacon, is you could move a whole fleet at once. If you command a whole fleet at once to jump to a specific resonance picked from subspace, it will automatically put the lead ship there, while sending out nearby resonance spots in order to the other four million ships, so they come out in perfect formation all in less than a second.”